February 26, 2009

Our internet is down at home. I don’t know how I used to function without internet and without a laptop always at hand. In our last apartment, Muffin and I would sit in the front room at our desks, literally five feet apart and IM each other. Now we sit on the couch, next to each other and IM. We talk also, but it’s just so fun to IM each other at the same time.

Now, I am totally adrift on a sea of discontectedness. I don’t know what’s going on with any of my blogs; I’m out of touch on gossip; and I am out of the loop in news. It amazes me that I went over two years without having internet at my house. Boggles my mind, really.

Muffin is supposed to call the cable company and get it fixed, but he has just come down with a cold. I don’t anticipate that he will get motivated to do it. Although, if he’s stuck on the couch watching tv, he will definitely want to have the internet available. I can only hope that he gets it working soon. I don’t know how much longer I’ll last.

February 23, 2009

You see, we were supposed to close today. We should have the key to our new house in our hot little hands. Yeah, that didn’t happen. This morning, I talked to our mortgage broker; We will close at the earliest nect Monday. This Monday, next Monday, it’s all the same when you work at a bank, right? Apparently.

That means that we have one fewer weekend to do our remodel. That’s really going to strain our schedule, and at this point all I want is to get our new floors in before we move in. I think we might be able to do it. We are goin gto have a grueling next few weeks, so I’m hoping we can at least enjoy this weekend since we have it.

February 19, 2009

We have successfully completed all of our retrofitting, and we got the final bill this afternoon. We should be all set, finally, so we just have to wait for the documents to get shuffled back and forth between escrow agent, mortgage broker, and lender before the loan can get funded. At this point, it looks like we’ll close on Tuesday, instead of Monday, as we originally expected.

Since escrow got all the documents today, they called to schedule our appointment. For today. I didn’t even know what documents we would be signing. It turns out, we signed all of our closing documents! We are totally done signing. Weird! In theory, all we have to do now is wait. You know, since we haven’t been waiting forever already.

It’s a little scary that we’re about five days away from owning a house. We can’t wait to move in, but even more, I can’t wait for the whole process of buying a house to be over!

February 18, 2009

Whoa, we’re scheduled to close in less than a week, on Monday. We’re getting bids from contractors now since we need to shorten the timeframe of construction. Since it takes three to five weeks to get a permit, we need the construction to go fast. We can still do the backyard and the spare bathroom before we have any permits, since they don’t get permitted. Everything else, including demo, has to wait until we have permits.

That means we really have a lot of time to do stuff that we might have put off before. We’re planning on painting the house and the backyard wall. We’re going to remove a layer of bricks on the fireplace so it’s not quite such a hulking behemoth.

Our big decision right now is flooring. We had decided on super awesome floors that were quoted at $9 per square foot, installed. When Muffin went back to get a sample, the guy said he didn’t tell us it was $9/sf, installed, maybe only for product and that it depends on the manufacturer since price varies. It’s not looking good for those floors. Luckily I found another one that I like at Lumber Liquidators. It’s only $4/sf, but that’s just for material. It will be a bit expensive, I think, for not being our dream floors.

We’re still trying to think of other things that we can do in the five to seven weeks before we can finish the house. I think I’ll be doing a lot of complaining.

February 17, 2009

Hmm, for some reason, this didn’t post on Sunday, so here it is. Nothing has changed since Sunday; we’re still just waiting.

We went over to do the retro-fitting on the house yesterday. We replaced two toilets with low-flow toilets and two shower heads with the low-flow version. It was pretty fun, but we were both exhausted afterward. Removing the old toilets was gross, of course. It looked like the current toilets had been there for 20 years, or they had been removed and replaced without the wax rings being replaced.

We’re still waiting on everything else. We found out that it takes three to five weeks to get a permit in LA, and you need a permit for some of the most ridiculous things, like replacing a window or patching a hole in the wall. Maybe that’s the case in every city, but it seems absolutely ridiculous. The permit process could really mess with our schedule, and I see a lot of fights coming down the road, unfortunately. I guess that’s to be expected, though, when you’re remodeling a house.